--- title: "Please, Look At This Photo of America" description: "Red and white and blue and asphalt." date: "2015-09-16" modified: "2015-09-16" authors: - name: "Ben Keeshin" link: "https://www.thedrive.com/authors/ben-keeshin" url: "https://www.thedrive.com/vintage/219/please-look-at-this-photo-of-america" categories: - "News" --- # Please, Look At This Photo of America ![]() *\www.thedrive.com* Do you love America so much that you bleed Corvette Gypsy Red? Do you believe great racetracks can have only one turn? Are you wearing rocketship underpants *right now*? Worship your new god: This 1970 photograph of a NASA promotional Corvette lapping Daytona with a real-life astronaut waving through the T-Top. (Alright, probably a real-life astronaut *suit* full of whichever Cape Canaveral intern drew the short straw.) Please, appreciate the color scheme. White Corvette Stingray, white-wall tires, white space suit, Old Glory patch and red-blue USA signage. Courageously splashed against a palette of asphalt-grey, our nation’s unofficial fourth color, this constitutes our most stylish representation of freedom to date. Despite the signage—uh, duct tape usually connotes a yard sale, not a superpower’s astrophysics division—this Corvette was part of a long-standing relationship between NASA and GM. The first American in space, Alan Shepard, drove to training in a ’57 ‘Vette. Five years later, he received the first C3 directly from GM as a gift. Three of the Apollo 12 astronauts ordered matching 427 Stingrays in custom black-and-gold, a [de facto NASA endorsement](). It’s the alpha and omega, a totem of all earthly planes: The Corvette’s shark-like styling recalls the sea, it’s thick tires massage the land and the astronaut prepares to fly through air toward the final frontier. Get to prayer—you’re no godless Communist. ## Author Ben Keeshin is a former staff writer for Maxim, and before that, contributed writing to the digital sides of Road & Track and Vanity Fair. ### Author social links [Twitter]()